Bar­bar­ian

A woman (Georgina Camp­bell) goes to an Airbnb she’s reserved, only to find anoth­er vis­i­tor already there, its own­er hav­ing dou­ble-booked the prop­er­ty through a dif­fer­ent rental site. The unex­pect­ed room­mate gives off a polite yet unset­tling vibe, and not just because he’s played by Bill Skars­gård, face of Pen­ny­wise the Danc­ing Clown in the recent It adap­ta­tions. Even before he lures her into the base­ment, any­one with a base­line knowl­edge of what movies are and how they work can see where this is going. Or can we?

We can­not. Writer-direc­tor Zach Creg­ger (best known for his work with sketch com­e­dy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, attempt­ing a Jor­dan Peele piv­ot here) traf­fics in mis­di­rec­tion, his ​‘twists’ less sur­pris­ing wrin­kles of plot than total rede­f­i­n­i­tions of mean­ing. He spends the first half-hour set­ting up one type of hor­ror movie until the intro­duc­tion of a new char­ac­ter (Justin Long, in fine form) sev­er­al states away from the action announces that we’re shift­ing course to anoth­er, a rug-pull top­pling the assump­tions that savvy view­ers make as sec­ond nature.

While open­ing-week­end tick­et-buy­ers in the States have been com­mend­ably tight-lipped about the spe­cif­ic nature of the one-eighty pulled after the first act, the lat­er UK release nonethe­less arrives a touch demys­ti­fied, a bolt from the blue now turned into an unknown known. But the lag in sched­ul­ing serves to under­score a tru­ism about gim­mick­ry ver­sus true clev­er­ness: unless a reveal deposits the sto­ry some­where inter­est­ing, the writer’s just play­ing an unsport­ing game of gotcha with an audi­ence who doesn’t know any bet­ter than to believe him. Once we know a twist is com­ing, the val­ue becomes what’s done with it, the same cri­te­ri­on that moti­vates re-watch­es of a film after we know what happens.

Ulti­mate­ly, Creg­ger takes an uncon­ven­tion­al route down a famil­iar path. One turn in the script widens the aper­ture on the theme of male pre­da­tion to nation­al­ly top­i­cal pro­por­tions, and anoth­er expands pat­terns of gen­dered vio­lence to a scope of decades. How­ev­er cor­rect the under­ly­ing con­cept may be in its asser­tions about the evil men do, the night­mares artic­u­lat­ing this idea have all been seen before, whether it’s the umpteenth des­ic­cat­ed naked old­ster (sure­ly there are more fright­en­ing things in this world than droopy boobs) or a mod­el of prob­lem­at­ic mas­culin­i­ty abun­dant­ly com­mon in the years since #MeToo first broke.

The mar­riage of com­men­tary to genre is not a har­mo­nious one; horror’s imper­a­tive to give us some­one we want to die has a sim­pli­fy­ing effect on an antag­o­nist freight­ed with a com­pli­cat­ed sig­nif­i­cance. This man is so easy to root against that his edge is dulled as an avatar of chau­vin­ism, a car­toon­ish fig­ure made to stand in for a real issue.

That blunt­ness belies Cregger’s del­i­ca­cy behind the cam­era as he inven­tive­ly reor­ga­nizes space to hide parts of a scene and keep us in sus­pense. He likes using door­ways to sub­di­vide a sin­gle shot into mul­ti­ple frames, or as a cold dis­tanc­ing effect when show­ing some­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly chill­ing. His impulse to play it stingy with infor­ma­tion works bet­ter on a visu­al than nar­ra­tive lev­el, its delib­er­ate mis­lead­ing more eas­i­ly swal­lowed in small dos­es than as the peg on which the entire film hangs.

Aller­gic to the pon­der­ous brand of overde­ter­mined ​‘metaphor­ror’ cur­rent­ly in vogue, Creg­ger pos­sess­es a showman’s instincts, his ener­gies pri­mar­i­ly invest­ed in pound-for-pound enter­tain­ment val­ue. Maybe that’s why the sub­ject at hand feels so per­func­to­ry, the broad fem­i­nist stance fill­ing out the vacant space in oth­er­wise unre­lat­ed macro- and micro-scaled tricks of struc­tur­ing. Men are all the same, as the oft-aired dater’s griev­ance goes, but the entry-lev­el per­spec­tive on can­cel cul­ture los­es sight of what makes the lat­est mod­el of creep a spe­cial sort of monster.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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